Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [138]
While immense reserves of manpower, and the lire equivalent of £13,000 per day, were put into combating Red Brigades terrorism, the extreme-right species were not idle. They killed a thirty-seven-year-old detective famous for arresting drug dealers as he sat in his car monitoring pushers operating outside a school. On 23 June 1980 they killed judge Mario Amato, who had specialised in investigating neo-Fascist violence. Then on 2 August 1980, at the start of the Italian summer holiday season, a huge bomb tore through Bologna railway station, collapsing an entire wing and its roof. Eighty-five people were killed in the blast, and a further two hundred injured. The mortuary was lined with small corpses wearing shorts, T-shirts and sandals for the beach.
Patient police work, facilitated by the mounting number of terrorist turncoats, led to the arrest of the leadership of Prima Linea and the liquidation of the group XXVIII March. Although the Red Brigades were capable of further assassinations, the police mounted simultaneous raids on several cities that saw the arrest of twenty-six key figures. They also found a haul of weapons and incriminating documents, the most significant to date. The Red Brigades struck back by kidnapping judge Giovanni D’Urso, the head of Italy’s prison system. They demanded the closure of a maximum-security facility at Asinara, an island off Sardinia, which the government had already decided to shut down. That conjuncture enabled the government to deny that it made concessions when the Red Brigades released the judge, who after thirty-three days was found in a car left outside the Ministry of Justice. On New Year’s Eve two loitering youths shot dead Dalla Chiesa’s chief associate, general Enrico Galviagi, as he and his wife returned from mass. In the new year, the police captured Maurice Bignami, the final founder of Prima Linea still at liberty, who was useful in incriminating Negri, dismissed contemptuously by Dalla Chiesa as the only instigator of terrorist attacks to be in receipt of grants from the National Research Council. This was not entirely accurate since among further arrests there was professor Enrico Fenzi, a distinguished scholar of Dante, who had become a Red Brigadist.
The Red Brigades carried out a number of kidnappings, lifting a Montedison petrochemical director while he was having lunch with his wife at home. After three weeks his corpse was found in a car parked outside his plant. Contrary to the illusion that such actions would trigger a proletarian revolution, sixty thousand workers marched through Mestre to denounce the ‘Nazi Red Brigadists’. The Brigades also hoped to make the pentiti think again when they abducted Roberto Peci, the electrician brother of Patrizio, the state’s star supergrass. After fifty-five days Roberto’s body was found on a rubbish tip; his face had been badly battered and he had been shot eleven times. The Red Brigades filmed his execution. In a novel departure on 17 December 1980 four Brigadists masquerading as plumbers kidnapped US general James Lee Dozier from his home in Verona, where he was in charge of logistics for NATO’s Southern European Command. They had to purchase a box of lead US toy soldiers in order to work out the ranks in the US army from the painting instructions that came with them. In this case an informer led the police to an apartment in Padua. They stormed the place and found Dozier tied up inside a small tent erected in the middle of the floor. Five terrorists, including the daughter of a prominent doctor, were detained without a fight. This in itself was a blow to the morale of the wider left-wing subculture that sustained the Red Brigades. By this time the police had also arrested forty-two-year-old Giovanni